When Doug came back to his chair, he brought the bottle along. It was close to half empty now.
"This ain't bad stuff," he said, and made a halfhearted gesture of offering it to me.
I declined with a wave at my own glass, still almost full.
"Thanks, I'm easing off a hangover. This is plenty."
He sat down heavily, with the contented look of a man who knew he had a pleasant few hours ahead, all the sweeter because he hadn't expected or paid for them.
"You're not the only one who thought that about Kirk," I lied. "I've heard other guys talk about how he had an inside track with Balcomb. It almost seems like they're in on some secret together."
Doug frowned in concentration. "Balcomb don't know his way around here," he said. "Kirk does. Plus he's a good whipping boy, and Balcomb needs that, too."
It was a sharper insight than I'd expected, but it still didn't do me any good. I tried to phrase another question, but Doug wasn't finished.
"I been watching how it works," he said. "I grew up stupid about that kind of shit, but I'm getting smarter." His head made a disgusted circle that took in the trailer and a whole lot more. "Look at this, and then look at what people like them got."
I couldn't fault him for thinking like that. Most people sold out in some way-I'd done it many times. The only question was price. But while he might get smarter, he was never going to develop the natural cunning of someone like Kirk or Balcomb. I was sure he hadn't been hedging his answers to me, and that he didn't have anything to do with the lumber being burned-I hadn't even seen a hint that he knew it had happened.
Just then the biggest of the kids, a grinning gap-toothed four-year-old berserker, lunged across the room and threw himself gleefully against his father's legs. He'd been playing a game that seemed to involve tackling whatever caught his fancy-he'd already taken out his wailing little brother and a laundry basket full of clothes and made impressive assaults on the furniture, all without parental rebuke. Now I braced myself for some yelling and maybe a slap.
But Doug only reached a hand down to catch and steady him as he careened away, paying no more attention than if it had been a newborn calf stumbling around. The gesture was so carelessly gentle and sheltering that it almost stunned me-swept away everything else I'd ever thought about him and left me confused. It was a kind of love, a generosity of spirit even if only toward his own flesh and blood, that was foreign to me.
The mellowing shift of gears didn't last long.
I heard a door open and glanced over toward the sound. Tessa stepped out of the bedroom, wrapped in nothing but a towel. Her legs were very long. I turned away hastily.
"Lord, woman, what the hell you doing, walking around like that?" Doug said, startled harshly out of his comfortable bubble.
"Taking a shower, what's it look like?"
"A shower? At dinnertime?"
Her voice took on an edge that pressed me back against my chair.
"I spend half my life trying to keep this place clean. But it's goddamn impossible and I always feel grubby, especially with all the shit you track in."
She walked on to the bathroom. Doug, glowering, knocked back another big drink of whiskey. Things probably would have been OK if they'd stayed there.
But Tessa said, archly, "In case you don't know, that's the man who fixed this door, so we could have some privacy."
I swear I wouldn't have looked at her again, but I realized that she was talking about me, and the response was automatic. She smiled over her shoulder, then tugged at the door to close it, but somehow her towel got caught in it and fell to the floor, and she had to kick it free before the panel slid home behind her. Her ass was a little on the generous side, but firm and quite attractive.
Doug saw me see it, and his eyes lit on fire.
"So you could have some privacy?" he barked at me.
"No, Doug, so you could-your family."
But he was heaving himself up from his chair. I backed ungracefully out onto the trailer's steps. On top of his busted nose and hammered ego and Christ knew how many other hard-ons, plus a bellyful of whiskey to amp them all up, he probably suspected Tessa'd been jumping somebody, and she'd just made me the odds-on candidate.
"Goddammit, it's not what you think," I said, but he kept stomping toward me the way he'd done yesterday, seeming to inflate like an old-time cartoon villain, while I felt myself shrinking like one of those mice. I hopped down the stairs and took off. I was in trouble enough for what I had done, and I wasn't about to get my ass kicked for what I hadn't.
As I trotted away, I caught a glimpse of the clothesline. There was just enough light around for me to recognize that rose-colored thong flying in the breeze like the defiant flag of a small republic, declaring its independence.
I was going to have to tell Madbird that while he might be done with the construction project, his services were still in demand out here.
32
As I rode to Helena I started getting into a drizzle that turned the pavement slick and the visibility poor. With just the flashlight duct-taped to the handlebars, I stayed on back roads and streets, making my way toward the area around the county courthouse. It seemed I'd been spending a lot of time there lately. The neighborhood was old and largely working class, although some younger professionals involved in the Montana version of gentrification were moving in. There was also a substantial element of small-time criminals, conveniently residing close to the jail. It couldn't have been much more different from the pristine country where Kirk had grown up, but it was where his girlfriend Josie lived, and he'd moved in with her when the ranch was sold.
I hardly knew her, mainly just to nod and say hi when I'd seen her out with Kirk. She hadn't grown up around here-I had it in my head that she was from the coast, Seattle or Portland. She was about twenty-five, with shoulder-length brown hair and a small slim build, quite pretty in an anorexic way-the kind of girl you'd see sitting at a bar on a summer afternoon, wearing cutoff jeans and a tank top with a little bow, and she'd seem fresh and appealing and amusingly smart-mouthed. But in time you'd notice the dark circles under her eyes as her makeup wore thin, and how she started seeming a lot older than her years, and that the tantalizing patter was never going to go anywhere except toward what was in this for her. When I was younger, I'd been quite good at not catching on to that sort of thing. It had taken me on some rides, but I couldn't recall one that hadn't turned out sour or outright troublesome.
The only time I'd exchanged more than a casual hello with Josie had been on a night several months back, when she'd come up to me in O'Toole's and asked if I'd seen Kirk. He must have been off on one of his runners. When I told her no, she said he was supposed to pick her up hours ago, and she was tired and wanted to crash, and would I drive her home? As soon as we'd gotten into my truck, she'd started asking me to make other stops-first at a convenience store for cigarettes, then at somebody's house where she probably scored some dope, and then she'd wanted to go to another bar. Instead, I'd driven straight to her and Kirk's place and stayed behind the wheel while she pouted her way inside. Back at O'Toole's, it wasn't long before I saw her come in again. But that time, she looked right through me as she walked past. I hadn't run into her since.
There was no reason to expect that she'd be happy to see me. I was starting to realize that a lot of people weren't. But she was bound to know some things about Kirk's drug dealings, and I'd been thinking more and more about Madbird's guess that that might have been how the horses were used. If the shred of nylon I'd found at the shed had come from the tarp wadded up with their carcasses, it suggested that the Cat had picked it up and carried it to the dump along with them. I was wondering if Balcomb had put the tarp down to keep from losing any cargo in the swamp that their blood and entrails would have made on the shed's dirt floor.